Aperiodic structures, order and disorder, complexity and entropy


  Shelomo I. Ben-Abraham [1]  ,  Alexander Quandt [2]  ,  Dekel Shapira [1]  
[1] Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheba, Israel
[2] University of the Witwatersrand, Wits, South Africa

Artificial aperiodic structures have recently been the subject of extensive and intensive research, resulting in layered quasiregular heterostructures, as well as photonic and phononic metamaterials with possible applications such as optical and acoustic bandpassfilters or photonic waveguides.  We are interested in fundamental questions about determinism, order and "disorder" and their quantification.  Specifically, we study multidimensional generalizations of the standard substitution sequences.  Here we present a novel substitution method to produce multidimensional paperfolding structures. We point out that the perfectly deterministic Champernowne and Copeland-ErdÅ‘s sequences have entropy ln 2 exactly like fair Bernoulli.  These examples clearly show that entropy, regardless of its definition, does not distinguish between deterministic and random systems.  There still remain many unanswered questions.